Totally Phat

Vets say our pets are getting fat. It's not very surprising.

Take Nushie, for example.



Look, there she is.

She is a pig. She is such a pig that sometimes she risks the wrath of Tommy and snatches food from under his nose. But at least the food she is snatching is healthy. Nushie only eats raw chicken, veges, yoghurt, garlic, and occasionally offal and green tripe. She loves green tripe.

For a treat, she likes corn chips and chocolate; well, doesn't every woman?

But she smells nice (on the outside), seldom needs a bath, doesn't have any skin irritations, her ears are pretty good (even if they don't work) and as long as she gets her food intake monitored and does her fasting day every so often, she maintains an almost-svelte 22 kg. Give or take a kg.

Not bad for an old broad of 7. It was her birthday last week.

20 years ago, the olds had a Shepherd/Doberman cross dog called King, lover of wildlife and crazier than a bug. The poor old bugger had what the vet called a flea allergy. Huge $$ to a new homeopathic vet and at about 9 years of age, his body just failed. I reckon dinner by the roll for dogs was a major factor in his crappy skin. When you look at what goes into it, how can it be good? Rotting meat and maggots? Really?

Shar pei are very touchy dogs. They can go from sleek and shiny to oily and smelly in no time, just from eating the wrong meat. Nush can't eat red meat or eggs without her snout becoming red and swollen and the difference between a roll fed shar-pei and a BARF dog is amazing. And dog biscuits aren't much better, all processed and uniform and unnatural looking.

It's pretty simple; they don't have to chase it; they don't have to kill it; they don't have to chew it and it's crap not being chewed anyway. Surely eating must be the greatest pleasure a dog knows? Fuck, they don't have much else. Except maybe the car. Dogs don't get to be dogs any more, they have to be farm dogs or lap dogs or police dogs or show dogs or guard dogs or whatever else plural form of a descriptive group of dogs dedicated to a common purpose fits, and that means too much time spent being told what to do. From a dog's perspective.

Dogs don't like being told what to do. Nushie tells me this every time she ignores me, but she's just an arrogant bitch. Shar pei are like that.

It's no wonder so many dogs are turning on people; they don't get no respect no more and it all comes down to human arrogance in believing that dogs (apart from Afghan Hounds**) are too dumb to chew their own food or digest anything unprocessed by Man.

That's a hell of a way to treat your best friend.

Raw Meat Rights for Rover. Now.

PS lets see Oprah do a show on diet and weightloss for over-fed Hollywood pooches and Dr Phil tackle the asynchronous symbolistic psychology of the owner/pet relationship.

** Afghan Hounds were once voted stupidest dog breed and too stupid to find their way to the end of the leash. It's true, I read it in a Time magazine so it must be.